Posted on by Gotamist

Science is…art?

I remember wanting to be a scientist since the time I was in kindergarten.  The people who advanced human knowledge.  They all seemed people highly deserving of admiration and respect. The ones who remained in human memory for hundreds or even thousands of years even as kings and emperors of the moment simply vanished from memory.

This remained unshaken, reinforced by everything I learned at school, everything seen in government messaging.  While, as a child, all adults seemed rich to me, I came to learn over time that some jobs pay more than being a teacher or even a scientist.  But who wanted that? Wasn’t that the same filthy lucre that we were taught to despise?  Going to an MBA program seemed like something that no one seeking a meaningful life would do.  Artists, leaders – meaningful.  Scientists and mathematicians too.  Doctor, nurse, engineer etc – noble enough and not evil, but basically not a creative person. And the rest, well blue collar and vocational, right? Not something to aspire to but fine, a way to make a living. And then the high-paying but professional careers such as lawyer, executive with an MBA – society had taught me that these were scum – greedy and soulless.

Over time, I came to realize that this is just a certain ideology taught to us.  In fact, engineers, workers and business people for the most part built the actual world we live in.  Nevertheless, I was not going to live that ordinary life, was I?  No, I was going to be a scientist, wear a tweed jacket, inspire children, be an intellectual, be a bulwark against the ignorant dogma of the religious right wing.  Of course, I believed in evolution – i’d have to be a bigot not to, right?  

As for material benefits, who cares about money.  I was not so deluded as to want to be rich! How much money do I need anyway?  I could easily be content with a permanent steady pay that placed me squarely in the middle class (yes, I told myself, this was a selfless acceptance rather than a craving for something truly elusive in the world – job security) and the title of scientist is far more prestigious than anything I could have with money.  All the people who matter would respect a scientist, right? In short, I know what it’s like to think that it’s the greatest job in the world and nothing else compares.  I also understood that a lot of people consider engineering to be nowhere near as glamorous as science.  But I never really understood or even probed why. 

The answer is simple.  I was taught to. By something in my education system even in middle school and elementary school. It is no different from PhD programs where everybody – profs, other students, graduates, all reinforce the idea that any career other than academia is a failure.  In a nearly circular argument, if it isn’t the greatest career, how come the acceptance rate is so low? And almost everybody who goes on to an academic role in the US also thinks, “I could easily have gone to the industry and made a lot of money”.  It may be true that from a sheer selectivity perspective, they could more easily have gone to the industry, but it’s not true that they could easily have made money. It is also not true that the people who can make it to academia are a strict subset of the people who can make it to the industry.  I do know a small number of people who did make it to academia, but would not have made it to certain industries. Making money in the world is hard – whether you came from academia or not.  A lot of people toil hard and never succeed.  

There was also romance associated with scientists.  All the scientists of yore, or at least of 18th and 19th century Europe, were gentlemen of leisure or so it seemed.  The same class that engaged in poetry, art etc.  The great engineers one hears about tend to be of the 20th/21st century and are just ordinary people who were trying to make a living.  Even people like Curie and Prandtl just felt so…elite.  I do recall thinking about how such a high-class atmosphere is declining.

But I have come to understand that many parents want to expose their children from a very young age to science – showing them dinosaurs by the time they are less than a year old – an animal they will never encounter in the world.  They do this in much the same way they expose them to art,, music, sport and other markers of high class that were simply inaccessible to lower class people. They raise them to be into science and they also raise them to be pro-science as in pro-scientist.  These are going to be the lady-and-gentleman class and not the apparently grubby working class of the engineer (only engineers don’t quite think that way).  Truly advancing science takes the same work and hustle as engineering.   Treating it as elegant artwork is either misleading or simply about guiding towards a lifestyle choice than towards what it takes to make an advancement.

In the US today, a majority (58%) of students in STEM graduate programs are foreign born. A majority of the students who excel at the high school level of the national talent search are children of immigrants (who don’t have disdain for engineering as a lower than science). We are frequently told that this is because scientists are not paid well enough. I contend that we should add to this that engineers are respected well enough.

People even walk away from engineers at a party at mere introduction while they are keenly interested in the work of scientists. In prestige, in the US, engineers come in after scientists, doctors, firefighters, professors, lawyers, military, nurses and other healthcare professions and teachers. Worldwide, scientists and doctors have significantly higher prestige than engineers. In the 20th and 21st centuries, most of the advances have been by engineers. Yet, engineers are not considered to be advancing the good of society or have some purpose other than earning a paycheck while all the other professions listed above are. Until this changes, forget about natively having the supply of engineers that the economy actually needs. Paychecks are not going to solve this.

I know this is almost a stream of consciousness and I may not have made any clear points or made a coherent argument for anything… just wanted to share things that crossed my mind in the past and the present.

Posted on by Gotamist

What should technologists do?/Is a liberal arts education better?

I was struck by a tweet from Sci-Fi author and engineer Devon Eriksen that a friend mentioned to me. I disagree with this Devon almost entirely (except for the fact that people need to learn to make their own judgements from data – even this I disagree that teaching it in school is the way to get there). 

This is the classic argument we have seen for some 70 years from (generally) leftists who have been vehemently pro college-is-the-solution-for-all despite being the party of the working class.  It’s part of their general pantheon – worship work-from-home, the 4-day workweek, ever more benefits, ever fewer hours and fewer demands on workers.  They mock professional education whether blue collar or white collar as code monkeys etc (and ask Elon Musk to stay in his lane as a technologist and out of politics) while glorifying art, literature, social work, poetry.

Here is a typical statement/wish/argument used as a criticism of AI, for example. It’s about what someone wants out of AI and technology.  The tweet forgets what that AI must be made – by human beings. And that the usual process for all products entering the market is that inventors /producers create the product and put it out on the market with people deciding only whether they want it or not.  While they try to tap into latent demand or long standing wishlists of society, it rarely ever starts with innovators being commissioned by “thought leaders” to go out and invent this or that. 

They want technical people to be workers who produce all the conveniences.  They, as the literary and intellectual class, will then appropriate all the goods of innovation using an equally-for-all argument.  Further, they will decide the direction of society by force because they can “critically think” while technologists need to shut up and continue working.

Back to Eriksen’s tweet, Harari’s point was just this – back then, you knew what skills you needed to be better off than without them, regardless of whether you conquered the Mongols or the Mongols conquered you.  Today, you don’t.  Devon Eriksen’s reading of  “servant” into this is wrong.  If you were a servant, you learned sheep-shearing.  If you were a lord, you learned horse-riding and archery (and you were decidedly not a servant).  

The lords were lords because they had coercive power (to inflict pain/death) and were thus able to make other people do the work for their basic needs while they had the luxury to enjoy fine things and also pursue arts and poetry. They did NOT become powerful through the pursuit of poetry and arts, but by the sword.

Those ages were decisively put to an end by the industrial revolution.  The new middle class were all people with an actual skill – the professional in a town lives better than a landlord in a village. As for the new lords, they are those who understood technology and were able to marshall others’ labor (own companies) or invest in them in a non-managerial capacity.

The warrior class is no longer wealthy and is not feared by their own population – still very much respected for their blood sacrifice, but only that.  All the richest in the world today are skilled technologists or business builders (descendents of these).  The only old guard members still rich are the ones investing in companies shrewdly (eg. British and Saudi Royal families).

Finally, to Eriksen, I say that one of the pieces of education that the unproductive leftist intellectual class says with great pride they impart to people in the humanities is “we TEACH critical thinking” while technologists don’t have that.

For some reason, all political science departments are full of leftist profs and students.  The only reason they can see why 50% of the population supports the other side is “well, they’re stupid”.  That doesn’t seem like a whole lot of critical thinking to me.

What do I think gets one ahead? – producing things or services that other people value, that you can trade in a consensual market.

Whether they are high art or basic necessities.  Kids learn math, grammar, sales (persuasion) or be excellent at entertaining (singing, painting, sports), learn to build things that people want to buy or employ you for.  These are hard enough that character building is an automatic side effect from the failures and restarts you’ll inevitably have to do.